May 2018
920 Words
“I was in Perth when they called me. I was in a bar talking to this older guy who used to be a photographic portraitist for The West Australian and he’d met everyone from Kelly Slater to Malala to Nelson Mandela to Brian Eno before he was forced into Redundancy. I have to come home, and I tell him this as politely as I can, but there’s just no way to leave a conversation gracefully when someone is telling you about the time they met Gandhi. But he let it happen, just sort of is what it is, he seemed to say. And when I got to the airport they told me that before I could get home I had to have a layover in LA and honestly everything went fine until I got there. You know I understand that the whole miracle of flight is insane to begin with and that modern aviation has about sixteen-trillion and five moving parts and that it’s remarkable that any of it ever works at all but does that make me feel any better when I’m sitting on the smoggy tarmac for two hours and all I can imagine is you lying here waiting for me and wondering what’s taking so long and why I had to leave in the first place? Of course not. It makes no difference. And for some reason as soon as we took off those thoughts disappeared even though the flight was always going to take as long as it was going to take. We finally landed in Philly but before I could drive back down to Delaware I had to get my luggage, which, can you even imagine it coming out on time? I resorted to sitting on the rim of the carousel and because of that I just so happened to look straight out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Arrivals area directly at a man about twice my age, doubled over, shaking his head, about six feet from two paramedics performing CPR on his wife. And it’s real-deal CPR, like I can see her abdomen lurching from the one paramedic’s hands shoving the air out of her and I can see her legs jerking from the other paramedic defibrillating her but it’s no use, and the paramedics know this, the husband knows this, I mean even I can see how gray her skin is from where I’m sitting. But I’m feeling sufficiently moved, sufficiently charitable, sufficiently alone, and I get up to go comfort this poor man but before I can take my first step I see another human approaching him with the same idea, but before they can reach him I see him mouth through the glass, ‘This can’t happen oh god this can’t happen,’ but before I could even start to think about feeling anything the chrome ouroboros I was just sitting on jolted and started to bring me my no-longer-lost luggage, but of course before I could get mine everyone else had to get theirs first. So now I could finally start heading to my car but before I could do that I had to find the goddamn garage it was in which was basically in another goddamn state and then when I did find it I had to pay the stupid fucking inept goddamn insect of a parking attendant before I could get it which probably cost more than the plane ticket itself and then once I finally got on the road I had to stop at the Waffle House in Smyrna because, you know, how could I not. And yes, the waffles were as good as always. You would have loved them. The chocolate chips melted and mixed with the butter and syrup to make one thick sweet sauce and I cherished it because I know how much you love it when that happens too. And then I drove straight here and had to shove past the stupid security guards before I could get to the room that the secretary told me you were in and I had to plead with the nurse because they usually don’t let people in at this point and finally after all that I could finally kiss you but before I could do that I had to get my face close to your face and maybe now you can see my whole issue. You simply have no idea how many invisible yet nonetheless real things are in between you and that which you seek, be they objects, people, ideas, until you discover just how close you can get to something without ever possessing it. And yet now nothing can stop me from giving you this big kiss right here on your forehead even though so much tried to and I’m sorry that Perth is a world away and I’m sorry that there are so many halfway points between here and there.”
There’s the sound of gasping and sucking that precedes the type of sobbing that could easily be mistaken for laughter if you weren’t paying close enough attention. His hands are on his knees and fluid drips from his mouth, nose, an 80/20 mixture of saliva, snot. He is silent now but his facial expression would misinform a deaf person that he was screaming. A person passing by the room sees him through the window, sees him shake his head, sees his lips say that this can’t happen.